


The Sorrows of Your Changing Face

by Fascinated



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Molly is awesome and no one knows, Molly reflects on herself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 22:55:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1112487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fascinated/pseuds/Fascinated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly knows what they see when they look at her.  She believes what they say about her.  But not when it really counts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sorrows of Your Changing Face

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up on a rainy day feeling sort of spacey, and this is what happened. Molly doesn't get nearly as much attention as she should. It's more of a character study than actual plot. Tone is meant to be sort of dreamy and soft. Title is from W.B. Yeats' poem "When You Are Old". Many thanks to Shmoopie313 for the beta and QuinnAnderson for the britpick. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

Molly believes them when they tell her she’s beautiful.  She also believes them when they take it back later – and they always take it back.  She wishes she could only believe one or the other.  Either she is beautiful or she is not.

It’s not the rejection that hurts the most, not really.  It’s the knowledge of herself, that she’ll never be more than this.  Shy, awkward Molly.  Molly who cares too much, who trips over her own words and wears frumpy sweaters like armour.  Molly that everyone thinks is “so sweet” and “such a dear.”  But in the next breath Molly is “a little strange”.  And Molly wants to scream at them that she’s _not_ “a little strange” just because she says the wrong things all the time when she’s nervous, or because she choose a career that puts her in a morgue ten hours a day.  None of that makes her _strange._ She’s a person, she’s real, and she’s just like any other.  But every time she tries to explain it she feels the familiar pain in her chest, like iron bands around her lungs.  Then she stammers and blushes and runs and no one knows.

So it’s not the rejection, not even from Sherlock.  (That’s more a way of life at this point, anyway.)  It is the unavoidable fact of being Molly Hooper and every once in a great while she’s just had too much of being herself.  Those are the nights she hates the most, because all she can do is cry herself to sleep with no one the wiser. 

She tries to step out of herself sometimes.  Be more than the odd-duck pathologist in the bulky jumper, maybe feel like she’s worth noticing for once.  That always seems to backfire, though.  Like that Christmas party.  Just thinking about it still brings an embarrassed flush to her cheeks.

Before the night was over she was back to plain old Molly.  Makeup stripped off, sheath dress replaced with that hideous bear-covered thing her mum had given her last year and covered with a lab coat.  At work on Christmas, because everyone else had someone else.

The whole way home and back to Bart’s she’d silently berated herself.  How dare she even try?  Who does she think she is anyway?  Why doesn’t she ever, ever know better than to be anything more than mousy little Molly Hooper?  By the time the Holmes brothers had arrived she’d managed to divest herself of any remaining traces of the evening.  She didn’t want to risk further eviscerating commentary.  She’d had enough for that week, thank you.

And so it goes, business as usual.  Sherlock ignores her until she’s useful again, then he smiles that charming, empty smile and she jumps to fetch whatever he needs.  It’s not like she doesn’t know what he’s doing, she’s not stupid.  It’s just that her body seems to respond before her brain catches up and she’s never learned the trick of saying “no”. 

But then suddenly it’s different.  Molly doesn’t know what’s changed, whether it’s Sherlock or her or just that the atmosphere around them has contracted and she can feel how he is slipping into himself in a way that frightens her.  Flashes of her dad come back, and she realises she’s looking at a dying man and it breaks her heart in a way she didn’t even know was possible.  The shock of sudden clarity jars her: this is not a man she loves.  This is a man she has pined for night after night, wished things could be different and she could be worth his notice.  But she doesn’t love him, not anymore.  She doesn’t even resent how he’s exploited her skills and intelligence like she wasn’t even a person, just another tool in his kit.  Right now she pities him and mourns for him, and wants to ease the hopelessness she feels radiating off him despite his denials.  So she offers the only thing she has: herself.

And then he comes to her late that night when there is no one else to see.  And he needs her after all.  And Molly Hooper, anxious and awkward and overlooked, finds steel in herself.  His plan is mad, and she is the only one he will entrust with the truth because she is the only one who can help him now.  So she takes a deep breath, centres herself, and discovers that she is so much more than she’d been led to believe.

She is Molly Hooper.  She is intelligent and resourceful and above all she is needed.  And that is everything she could want. 


End file.
